Chinese dessert

I decided that I don't have to eat ice cream for dessert at Chinese restaurants anymore. Oh, sure, it was a treat when I was a kid. The soft-serve ice cream machine, whirring softly in the background, making sudden and inexplicable grinding noises, would not just produce ice cream. Oh no, this magical contraption could fill my container with not vanilla, and not chocolate ice cream; the creamy goodness was incomprehensibly infused with both flavors. I could pile it is high as the container would allow. Sometimes I could even sneak a massive soup bowl to the ice cream machine and set myself up for a massive diabetic coma. The toppings were varied and plentiful. I would always disregard my vow to never again put Gummi Bears on cold ice cream, and then remember why I promised myself when those rock-hard filling-pullers would temporarily fuse my teeth together. But the layers of ice cream, chocolate fudge, and various bits of flavored high-fructose corn syrup never stopped calling my name.

But I realized today that I don't really care for soft-serve ice cream. Get ready for a shocker: compared to the real thing, soft serve ice cream doesn't taste that good! The novelty of piling up ingredients as high as I could and eating it all lost its appeal for me some time in college. And I have noticed the ice cream topping bar has gone the way of toys in Happy Meals of my youth; sure, they're still there, but when you remove the aspect of self-assembly from the process, the end result just isn't rewarding.

From now on, it's tapioca pudding all the way.